5 Challenges your IT Service Desk Faces Everyday

The demand for help desk services increases faster than staffing and budgets can keep up with; creating a series of problems that stifle the user experience. Knowing what the most common challenges are can help businesses tackle them early on in order to function smoothly and continue achieving outstanding customer satisfaction levels.

IT services are costly, so without efficient processes in place it can be difficult to address questions and tasks in a cost efficient way without sacrificing quality. This is because the more time the service desk dedicates to answering the phone or sifting through requests sent by email or even in person, the less they can focus on ironing out issues.

Phone calls are especially time consuming because they flood queues quickly and take a long time resolve. This is not only bad for IT service personnel, but also for the users who expect a fast resolution. They often wait in a long queue before talking to someone, causing frustration and rifts in the service experience.

Challenge #2: Long resolution times and lost issues

The more necessary technology becomes in a business, the need for instant troubleshooting increases dramatically. This can quickly become a problem when the service desk is receiving too many requests to handle and doesn’t possess the necessary communication tools. For example, a survey conducted by TechValidate found that up to 43% of IT help desks use email to track user requests. Productivity is stalled when staff must sort through these requests manually.

Without a structured ticket intake process and request tracking tools, the IT service desk also misses out on the opportunity to capture data that can help identify common issues and ultimately speed up future resolution times.

Challenge #3: Recurring issues

Directly tied to our previous challenge is the headache of unresolved, recurring issues. Without good recordkeeping and data analysis tools, help desks can’t easily identify systemic problems; instead time and company resources are wasted investigating and resolving the same ones time and time again.

If the team is unable to capture valuable data, it is difficult to create adequate plans to address these hiccups and reduce the number of submitted tickets to tackle the origin of common problems that users report.

Challenge #4: Problems keeping track of user’s assets

Oftentimes, problems are tied to user equipment and solutions need to be created by acquiring knowledge about these assets. While tedious, this allows the service team to learn how to tackle specific problems.

When users with the same assets look for assistance, for example, experience would allow the IT desk to resolve the issue by analyzing service histories without having to repeat the whole process of troubleshooting every single time. This drastically enhances productivity; but a TechValidate survey found that 33% of IT help desks do not track assets at all. When tracked, they are often recorded on spreadsheets and outdated tools that can generate unreliable information if not curated properly.

Challenge #5: Repetitive, time-consuming tasks

Typically, there are a variety of frequently asked questions and problems that the help desk has to deal with regularly. This means that a lot of time is wasted in doing the same processes time and time again. Password resets are the biggest culprit, constituting an astonishing 20% to 50% of help desk calls.

Oftentimes, the issues that the helpdesk deals with can also be resolved by the end user if they have access to the right information or by automatic processes. Not having these in place can really suppress your department’s potential and incur a lot of unnecessary costs.

Moving forward

IT Service Management can provide relief from these pesky challenges and revolutionize an underperforming help desk with outdated tools and processes into a modern and efficient department that is able to respond instantly to issues or requests.

Aside from streamlining procedures for better productivity through automation, data repositories, data analyzing tools and self-service portals; the right platform can transform your IT service desk into a cost-efficient powerhouse. Backed by stellar performance and excellent reviews, ServiceNow can revolutionize your help desk.

ServiceNow allows users to request help for incidents online, cutting down on interruptions. It uses powerful incident management tools to track incidents and creates alerts and follow up messages when attention is needed. ServiceNow also records data and allows you to easily identify recurring issues to tackle them head on. Finally, it integrates a knowledge base and self-service portal so that users don’t have to always rely on the help desk for simple tasks.

Get in touch with our experts to find out more and to learn how we can help you to overcome your IT helpdesk challenges and enhance your procedures.